{"id":140,"date":"2008-05-06T21:49:15","date_gmt":"2008-05-06T20:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/2008\/05\/06\/dont-ask-me\/"},"modified":"2008-05-06T21:49:15","modified_gmt":"2008-05-06T20:49:15","slug":"dont-ask-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/dont-ask-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Don&#8217;t ask me!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, I attended a seminar given by a &#8216;sales guru&#8217;.  Great, I thought, as I went in &#8211; this will be exactly what I need.  Well, sort of!The guru&#8217;s presentation style was engaging and the audience was invited (even encouraged!) to get involved: what&#8217;s more, there was applause at the end and the audience went away happy. But those I spoke to afterwards <strong>all<\/strong> mentioned that the presentation wasn&#8217;t relevant to them personally- though they were sure <em>other<\/em> people found it useful&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I was not satisfied at all. Why not?<\/p>\n<p>Well, because the presentation started with 20 minutes when we in the audience were asked as share our specific issues. So far so good &#8211; but the presenter&#8217;s response was simply to throw that page of the flipchart away and make his prepared presentation in any case. So what was the point of the interaction? I don&#8217;t know &#8211; particularly not as the presenter ran out of time at the end of his session and didn&#8217;t quite have time to give us the free, high-value stuff he&#8217;d been promising&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;maybe I&#8217;m just unduly cynical though!<\/p>\n<p>In old-fashioned management speak, presentations can&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>tell<\/li>\n<li>ask<\/li>\n<li>sell<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8230;or sometimes a combination of these. However, ask-&#038;-tell is rarely a good idea. Why? Because it&#8217;s a betrayal: it sets your audience up for one thing and gives them another, risking leaving a sour taste in their mouths. If your purpose is simply to tell or sell, then have the courage to do exactly that!<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t get me wrong, I&#8217;m not saying there&#8217;s anything wrong with <em>any<\/em> of these approaches, so long as you use the appropriate one for the occasion. Like most things in designing presentations it&#8217;s not rocket-science, just common sense: the hard part lies not in knowing which style your presentation is but in remembering to ask yourself first.<\/p>\n<p>And if you don&#8217;t ask yourself the question, you don&#8217;t know.  And if you don&#8217;t know, you might have the wrong one!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, I attended a seminar given by a &#8216;sales guru&#8217;. Great, I thought, as I went in &#8211; this will be exactly what I need. Well, sort of!The guru&#8217;s presentation style was engaging and the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}